The First Domain Lies in What Is Currently Called Pathology

Although the term the Internet of Things was coined by Kevin Ashton in 1999, the systemic thinking to install miniature sensors and computers into the real world started in the 70s, 80s, and 90s coined as pervasive computing, ubicomp, and ambient intelligence. In this chapter about 20 IoT experts talk about the beginning in their various roles and fields. Showing how difficult it is to spot emergent trends when you are in the middle of it, it explains that IoT is a horizontal operation. You see it as IoT when you see the connectivity that is driving it as a separate driver. The critique that IoT received from surveillance and privacy activists that was strong in the first decade of the twentieth century was compartmentalized into the discussion on the GDPR and the issue of fake news, fueled by the latest developments in AI. This is why there has been up till now no holistic understanding of what kind of hybridity has formed—or been organized—in under 25 years. The argument is made that we lack a pedagogy for this merging of analogue and digital. One of the most damaging aspects is that the endless scrolling and lack of beginnings and ends in the web and apps deprive us of moments of “closure,” moments that are essential to what it means and should feel to be human. Instead of sets of properties building a meta-connected infrastructure, a meta-connected object was built as the mobile phone. It has created a vast and ubiquitous “extra.” This “extra” has not yet been recognized as something that should be brought under multi-governance public control. Currently it is seen as a mobile phone. In fact, it has way more potentiality as a “kenner.”